David Bowie was the vanguard of popular music

News of David Bowie's death arrived like news of his surprise comeback almost exactly three years ago, in the early hours of a bleak January morning. This time, however, a bulletin from Bowieworld made the morning even bleaker and the disbelief was horrific rather than magical. In our house, like so many others, it wrenched the day out of joint. My wife burst into tears, my oldest daughter sang "Life on Mars?" and I had the same reaction as if I had lost a friend or family member rather than a pop star: a stubborn, instinctive "No".

In pop terms, Bowie's death is a hole in the sky; a disturbance in The Force. It's customary when a great musician dies to play some of their songs in tribute but we are always listening to Bowie, and to people inspired by Bowie. He's one of the elements that constitute the air that pop music breathes. The radio played "Space Oddity" but it could have played any of a couple of dozen peerless songs and they would have been no less representative.

Bowie is arguably the most powerful argument for a Great Man theory of pop. You can talk about broader cultural energies and inevitable trends but music wouldn't have changed as quickly, or as excitingly, without Bowie in the forefront, driving it on with his vast, overheated imagination. He was often in the vanguard; at times he was the vanguard. Each of his classic albums presented younger artists with a toolkit, a map and a message that he summed up in his generous, baton-passing anthem "Rebel Rebel":

I'm moving on. It's up to you now. Looking back, you can hardly believe how fast he moved. "I can look back on a song that I've just written and it means something entirely different now because of my new circumstances, new this or that," he said in 1972. Just look at him go.

On Radio 4's Today programme John Wilson said it was a fallacy to call Bowie a chameleon because chameleons blend in with their environment whereas Bowie reconfigured his environment. He had a voracious appetite for exciting developments in music, cinema, fashion, media and visual art and the strength of vision to mould these whirling influences into records that were unmistakeably David Bowie. You could argue that a genius is someone whose extraordinary world-hunger is equalled only by their capacity to harness it.

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In this way, Bowie was the greatest ever ambassador for pop music in all its exhilarating variety. His pioneering gender-fluidity sprang from his sense of the self as an entity in constant flux. To Bowie life, like art, was a series of successful performances. You can be whatever you say you are, over and over again, provided you are entertaining and persuasive enough. As he ricocheted unceasingly between roles and genres and continents, he gave his dazzled fans the impression that the possibilities were limitless.

He was an avatar of pure liberation, demonstrating what a playground life could be, what spectacular things you might achieve, how many different personalities you could inhabit.

Whether you were a fellow musician or just a fan - though he always believed that there was nothing "just" about being a fan - he opened doors that revealed whole new rooms you never knew existed.

Why be normal when you could be everything?

Looking back, you can hardly believe how fast he moved.

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Bowie knew he had cancer all the time he was making his latest album Blackstar but he withheld the news. His final gift, to himself as well as us, was to allow this brilliant album to be received on its own merits, undistorted by a sense of finality and the sentimentality that comes with it. For just three days after its release last Friday, it sounded like someone racing forward rather than looking back and you could imagine that yet another new phase had begun. Now it transpires that he knew this would be his last record, which makes its fearless strangeness even more impressive. He left us in mid-leap but, perhaps, theatrical to the last, he furnished the stage for his exit. Today the image on Blackstar's sleeve strikes the eye as an elegantly minimal memorial: a void in the shape of a star; a stark, imposing reminder of everything that is suddenly gone.